


Katabasis

by unheroics



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-19 07:40:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10635315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unheroics/pseuds/unheroics
Summary: Flint discovers Thomas is a passenger aboard the Maria Aleyne alongside his father.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place an arbitrary five years before the events of canon, but some timeline details are muddled. Yolo, my friends.
> 
> Infinite thanks to [Azarias](http://archiveofourown.org/users/azarias) for making sure this was coherent and readable, and being generally enthusiastic while I bitched and moaned, and to [redacted; nonnies] for many a great discussion about the show.

**i.**

They came at the Maria Aleyne from the aft: black flag held back until the very last moment, the crew held transfixed at the point of no return. Upon seeing English colours to match the Maria Aleyne’s own, her first mate hailed them. At the forecastle Flint stood unmoving, the ships at a hair’s breadth distance, and not a living thing capable of drawing air until he said, “Now,” the Walrus’s collision trajectory inevitable.

Now, raise the black, guns at the ready, prepare to board. Commands repeated so often as to be routine, yet the thrill of danger never would subside.

The sea nipped and clawed at the hull, its noise soon subsumed by the moan of wood on impact and men screaming, in fervour and in agony. To die or to kill, Flint thought, sounded much the same. Far over the horizon, water ate its daylight child to birth the moon, and in fading sunlight the slaughter aboard the Maria Aleyne was painted all red.

The first minute of boarding was always the most precarious, more than politics, for it was wholly subject to chance. Slip in a pool of blood; take a musket ball meant for another; misjudge distance and, instead of finding purchase in a net, plunge into the sea with no hope of rescue. All those ways to die, and none of them had claimed Flint yet. Perhaps he’d developed immunity. Perhaps — this he thought after each success, and each of those unlikely in the face of dismal odds and ragged edges of mutiny — perhaps that was purgatory, fashioned for individual punishment: to live.

A pistol shot rang past his ear. Deafened, he struck down a panicked gunner, then, in turn, took a slash across the back. Turn, draw left-handed, fire. Another man fell. The pain of injury would register much, much later.

Captain James Flint cut a bloody swathe through the Maria Aleyne’s dwindling but stubborn crew, heading belowdeck, to the hold, apex predator homing in on prey. The vanguard had already cleared it: bodies lay strewn across the boards, fragmented or mangled. One, Flint recognised as the Walrus’s own carpenter’s mate. What had the kid thought, trailing after hardened killers? His face was frozen in an expression of mild surprise. Flint did not kneel to close his eyes.

The cabin in the hold was locked, but not boarded. It yielded with a groan of hinges. Inside, a man and woman cowered. There was quite a lot of pleading, and an offer of riches unimaginable.

Afterwards, Flint took care to wipe their blood from his sword.

His quartermaster found him not five minutes later, gore-stained to the elbows; his jaw looked clenched tight enough to splinter bone. Flint acknowledged him with a nod.

“Is it done?” An unnecessary question. Above, the noise of struggle was dying, and the emergent calm was punctuated with the singular screams of men put down one by one, in the manner of sick animals.

“It’s done.” Gates looked past Flint’s shoulder, into the cabin, gaze lingering on the blood seeping into the deck, haloing the corpses of Alfred Hamilton and his second wife. “We won’t be ransoming them, I take it.”

“He drew on me.”

A breath of silence, in which the Maria Aleyne chose to make her abuse and consequent displeasure known in a groan of boards and hinges, a muted submarine echo of pain. It was dark, and getting darker by the second. If Gates could see the pronounced lack of weapons within the cabin, or the stark terror upon the faces of both passengers, he chose to keep his counsel.

“There’s something you should see to,” he said instead. “Dufresne is looking through the manifest — not nearly enough to cover our costs, I should mention. And there’s note of chattel property, in a secure hold towards the aft.”

“Slaves. How many?”

“Nary a dozen, else we’d see more food and drinking water.” Gates frowned, gaze focussed in the middle distance but attention razor-sharp. “I can’t figure why’d anyone lock up chattel more safely than whatever landed gentleman just — drew on you.”

“Find out how many men we’ve lost,” said Flint, moving already towards the deck. “See if anyone wants to fill the positions. We’ll get coin for the rest, at least, if they’re worth anything.”

“There isn’t much on this ship worth selling.” Gates spoke carefully, with weight enough to stop Flint in his tracks, though not enough to turn. “No jewels, no spices. Some rare silks and damask, and we could sell the powder and shot instead of pilfering for our own… Listen. The men —”

“Mr Gates. Sort out the slaves,” said Flint, and heard Gates sigh, in frustration if not entirely defeat, but was not pursued.

The metallic tang of copper coated Flint’s teeth and his palate; he felt it over his face and neck, where it had sprayed in a wide arc from the jugular of the Earl’s wife. Did she deserve to die? Rather, the question Flint had asked himself before putting the sword to her throat was whether he could live with himself in the likely event that she had not deserved it, not at all; and the answer had been, yes. He could. For as long as he had to.

Although his sword was clean, his hands were not. The blood on them had dried, sometime between the kill and the chill nighttime air, and now began to flake whenever he flexed his wrists, dropping away like scabs; but in the swaying glow of oil-lamps, there remained a pinkish, dirty residue. Soon he would wash, if time permitted, but still he scrubbed one palm over the other anyway, little good though it did him.

It seemed as though nightfall had descended indiscriminately in the short time he had spent belowdeck. Overcast, with the sounds of distant thunder enough to set his teeth on edge, the Walrus and Maria Aleyne could be the last ships on God’s earth, surrounded by darkness encroaching on all sides, darkness and the sea. Outwith the range of sparse light, the water was black as murder and viscous as tar.

Men, variously bruised or injured, nodded as Flint passed. Was it respect or mere satisfaction at a job completed, and not a life lost too many? Perhaps they did not know of the carpenter’s mate, mute and staring with unseeing eyes, cursing them all. One of the Maroon gunners was chastising another for undue cruelty; he had got blood on the other man’s shirt. The Maria Aleyne creaked, smarting at the tethers keeping her captive.

“Bad luck to sail in such a weather,” someone said, and spat onto the deck, to ward off ill fortune. His voice was snatched and carried by the wind, at the tail of water’s spray that could have been the beginnings of rain.

As though in answer, the deck lurched beneath Flint’s feet. He took hold of a rope to steady himself as oil-lamps swayed, leaving after-impressions upon the insides of his eyelids. The Maria Aleyne, bathed in the sweat and tears and shit of its crew, seemed to want only to shake off the Walrus men as a dog shakes off fleas. The air reeked of both her blood and her hatred, and, deep beneath the waves, there was a sound like whalesong, but ghoulish. Far-off thunder, reverberating across the ocean floor where no man was meant to venture.

He found Dufresne in the captain’s cabin, bent over a desk that stood fastened to the floor with rope and bolts. They all creaked, they and the deck beneath Flint’s boots, masking the sounds of his approach.

“How are we doing, Mr Dufresne?”

Dufresne flinched, but shortly regained his composure. He looked at Flint, hawkish despite his mild countenance. “Quite poorly, I should say. There’s simply not enough here for us to come out on top. And given the deaths, and how much it’s taken to seize this ship, I don’t think the men will be quite as pleased as you anticipated.”

“Mr Gates suggested selling powder and shot,” said Flint. He had known, of course, that none would be happy once it became clear that the Maria Aleyne would yield nothing of value; that is, nothing of value to the crew.

“Yes, he’s mentioned. We still don’t know how much powder and shot there’s left, though.”

Flint pressed his hands into fists, and when it did nothing to assuage the knot of briars tightening his stomach, he put one palm to his brow, as a man might to chase a headache. “Then we’ll check. Keep at the manifest; I have faith in your ability to turn our misfortune about.”

“I’m good at numbers, Captain, but I can’t fashion them out of thin air. The Maria Aleyne was not carrying the goods we’ve been promised.”

‘By you’, went unspoken, but Flint heard the admonition all the same: as though Dufresne thought that the crewmen’s deaths did not weigh on him. How many? He had seen the carpenter’s mate, his broken corpse, but the others had not been tallied as yet, and Flint thought it fruitless to hope that no more would emerge, dead or dying.

“Keep at it, Mr Dufresne,” he said, darker perhaps than was advisable. But if Dufresne heard the threat, Flint never knew, for the boatswain chose that moment to knock upon the cabin door and enter without invitation.

“Captain, you’ve got to see this.”

“What is it, Randall?”

The man swept the cabin with a watchful gaze, stopping for a fraction of a moment on Dufresne’s tense posture, but did not comment before saying, “That cabin at the aft, belowdeck, where we thought there’d be slaves? There ain’t no slaves. Just an Englishman, and drugged to the gills, with a letter of recommendation —”

The words blurred; Flint shook his head. “Let’s go.”

He could not say what it was that had propelled him forward: irritation, exhaustion, or the thought that action might keep his rational mind at an arm’s length removed, where it would not fixate on the sight and reek of blood that soaked his shirt and leathers.

He had not expected revenge — eye for an eye and life for a life, Biblical in its horror and its simplicity — to leave him this hollow, or this uneasy. Perhaps it was simply exhaustion. Or perhaps he would know peace only in giving Miranda the news, so that she may call the act of murder righteous and imbue it with meaning and absolution, that Flint could not grant for himself. She would, if nothing else, understand.

He followed Randall across the deck, past men now moving with a sluggishness that spoke of tempered bloodlust. Some saluted, offered a few kind words for the boatswain and stiff nods to Flint, for which he could not fault them. If it had not already, word would spread soon that their sweat and struggle had been in vain.

The Maria Aleyne was more sparsely populated, with some of the Walrus’s crew returned, and the bodies swept aside or thrown overboard to feed the nocturnal animals circling and hungry beneath the water’s surface. Barrels of gunpowder and wrapped bales of silk were being moved from one ship to the other; the Maria Aleyne dipped out of the water inch by inch, the burden of her cargo lessened.

A gaggle of sailors stood talking amongst themselves, and their small congregation was where Randall took Flint. They framed the hatch to the hold belowdeck, wreathed in shadow and trembling oil-light like one of the Dutch paintings that Flint remembered Miranda to have so loved in another life. _Night Watch of the Lawless Men_.

He pushed past them, ignoring the conversation that was not stopped on his account (“Christ, if we don’t get paid for this my nuts’ll rot off from lack of use.” “Ain’t you the one boasted you don’t need to pay to get your cock yanked?” “Just ‘cause Charlotte loves me don’t mean I’ll deprive her of her livelihood, mate, I’m not a monster —”); it all seemed strangely muted by the pound of blood in Flint’s ears as though someone were holding seashells to them, and he could hear the ocean’s echo.

It was almost quiet belowdeck, and the cabin stood open with more men coming and going as though without a purpose. Joji stood voiceless sentry at the door. When Randall said, “You’d think they didn’t have jobs to do, the lazy motherless lot,” Joji only shrugged.

The cabin was not empty, but it was lit in unsteady patches that swayed with the motion of the sea, and had about it the faint but cloying smell of opium tincture and camphor. There were Flint’s men, one leaving the cabin, another ransacking a chest for treasures, another still turning to speak to Randall; the words exchanged escaped Flint, as all else did, once his gaze fell to the Englishman.

He knelt barefoot on the deck, and wore the undyed, colourless linen of prison or asylum garments. For a precarious second Flint could only think that his hands had had nary a mark upon them, five years ago, and now were as scarred as those of a gamekeeper or veneur. He looked nothing like the man whose presence haunted Flint’s dreams, always at the corner of the vision, always cold to the touch and bleeding from the eyes and mouth.

In all his careful planning, and all his mirthless revenge, Flint had never thought to anticipate a variable in place of a set value. The presence of other men about was like an anchor at his feet, dragging him underwater, but it was Alfred Hamilton’s blood on his hands that kept him immobile.

“Will you kill me?” said Thomas Hamilton, in a voice harsh from paregoric. His tone had a note of morbid, queer hope. “I could pay.”

_To spare you, or kill you?_ It was excruciating to wonder.

He was bowed at an awkward angle, and Flint saw belatedly that his wrists were chained. Such a small cruelty, for where would a man escape to aboard a ship? Still Thomas would not, or could not, look up; and the crew around them were silent, waiting for the captain to show them which way the situation would unfold. How Flint wished it to unfold was quite different to how he knew it must; to stray now would doom him.

He stepped forward to kneel before Thomas and lie to himself that his words might go unheard, kept in the space between them where the crew might not hear the cracks in Captain Flint’s mask, or the fraying about his stage costume.

“You’re safe, my lord.” Thomas jolted at the words, as a man struck by lightning, but before he could speak Flint put one bloodied hand at his neck, to tilt his head upwards, one thumb beneath Thomas’s chin.

Later Flint would relive this second of hesitation in painful detail: the bruised shadows beneath Thomas’s eyes, and pupils wide with the drug. The thin, wearied, beaten whole of him that still had Flint scrambling for coherent thought as when he had first seen him. And, of course, his own rust-stained hand upon Thomas. Later, he would recall all of it with perfect clarity.

For now, he said only, “Just cooperate, and don’t cross me or my men.”

He called for Randall, and bade him fetch the surgeon, Stapleton, to see to the hostage; he barked orders that he could not hear and answered questions he could not decipher. He felt acutely the loss when he stood, and Thomas was left on his knees, swaying in time with the sea that rocked the Maria Aleyne.

Flint turned away before Thomas could ask whose blood now made a stark handprint over his flesh.

The surgeon met him outside, and Flint’s instructions for him brooked no argument: “Take the gentleman to my cabin and see to his wellbeing. They had him dosed with the tincture of opium; make sure that he’s eased off it. As for the rest of you,” he said, loudly enough to be heard above the night-time sounds of the sea and ships creaking against one another. He wondered at the alienness of his own voice, calm where he felt nothing of the kind. “I would appreciate it greatly if you gave our guest the respect due his” — sardonic half-smile, there, the mask re-assumed, the actor invisible beneath the lie — “exalted station.”

Scattered laughter; it seemed to Flint like a nail driven between the ribs. Someone called, “A proper nobleman? We get a ransom for him, then?”

“Enough money to whore and drink and piss away the next year.” How short the crew’s memory was: no-one seemed eager to recall that, not a day prior, Flint promised them Sephardic goods, not a nebulous promise of a ransom. “But lay hands on him, and I’ll see you swing from the mainmast. It’s my money, too.”

More laughter, and murmurs of assent.

Walking away from the cabin and leaving Thomas behind was akin to fighting the Earth’s own pull.

Flint was amongst the last to return to the Walrus, even as unwilling as he was to spend more time board the Maria Aleyne than absolutely necessary. There might as well have been knives strapped to her deck, for all that walking it evoked a strange sort of pain, insidious and undefined but for the ship’s abject hostility.

Under cover of darkness Flint made his way to the captain’s cabin, that Dufresne had evacuated to oversee the transfer of goods and prisoner aboard the Walrus. The cabin had about it a specific kind of silence, that was not a silence at all: it creaked, the desk against its tethers and the boards against their nails, a small unceasing symphony of un-life, reminding one of the fragility of human constructs. The Maria Aleyne was sturdy, as the battle to board her had proved; and the Walrus was sturdier still. But neither of them could withstand the fury of the sea, if the sea wished them ruined.

As soon as the cabin doors were made fast, strength deserted Flint, and he collapsed to his knees. He fell on one hand, a hand coated in that cursed blood that he thought might never be cleaned away. The thought made him retch, and he spat bile onto the boards to keep from vomiting outright.

There was a washbasin in the corner, that he made himself fetch, and freshwater that smelled musty and stale; he stripped out of his coat, to his shirtsleeves, to better scrub at his hands until the water was pink and the dirt was gone from beneath his fingernails, and the skin over his palms was scratched and raw.

And then, careful to think of nothing of substance but the physical and the immediate — his exhaustion, and the wet leaking of blood through his shirt-sleeve where the fabric had been slashed clean through — he looked to the Maria Aleyne’s scant and pitiful collection of novels and monographs, to choose one at random.

The noise aboard the Maria Aleyne, of men pilfering whatever they could to satisfy their animal need to hold, possess, then destroy; the sea, lashing at the hull with venomous purpose; shouts and conversation that echoed in the night; the noise of it all was such that no-one heard the shattering of furniture and breaking glass within the captain’s cabin.

No-one thought to worry, since Captain Flint emerged unscathed and opaque behind the eyes, as always.

…

_…concerning my son. The business in London has been drawn to a close, yet his time at the Royal Hospital has not aided T. in his struggle with the vile Ailments that plague him. I have knowledge of a man, in possession of a penal colony near Savannah, whereupon he provides for men such as T. whose shame threatens to shame their Families in turn; he grants them anonymous exile._

_…I trust that you find your term as Governor prosperous. Your name is spoken in London with admiration, concerning in particular your struggle against the barbaric attacks by Papist Spaniards and the French upon Charles Town, as well as your firm Loyalty to the Crown against the pirate threat. It is my hope that your successes continue._

…

He slept in fits and starts on the gun deck, chilled to the very bone by a sudden white squall that had sent the middle watch scrambling for purchase and the Walrus pitching at a steep angle, just past four bells. The sky was grey, and the sea black in reflection, as if they had somehow been transported into the home waters near London, where weather was one dreadful, choppy monotony of gloom.

Flint could feel Gates’ curious eyes on his back, and likewise the morning watchmen who had not expected to see him already at work. But the Walrus’s deck and her constant demand for labour and attention were the only things that kept Flint’s tether of control from fraying, with his cabin occupied and Thomas within it sleeping off the paregoric, per Stapleton’s instruction; and Flint had nothing but time, and nothing to do but kill it, or go insane.

Alive. Flint spoke the words in his mind, tasting the shape of them: he is alive. He felt the change that it wrought in him, Thomas there and well: the cracks upon the slab of Captain Flint’s mask and manufactured identity, and something he had thought long dead and buried struggling to rise from its grave.

The Walrus men seemed suddenly as hostile as the sea, as the Maria Aleyne’s smouldering funeral pyre when they had left her last night. One wrong move would see the crew toppling into mutiny, and the truth would see Flint hanged or shot where he stood. He felt the possibilities splintering from each decision he had made, but could not find fault in any, last night. He tried not to think of Alfred Hamilton’s blood spraying his face, the walls, the deck.

In the corners of his vision he could see it, seeping into the boards. It crept ever closer to his feet, and Flint was certain that were that spectral red to reach him, he would be dragged under, and drowned. Never before had he felt the ghosts of his dead cling to him, but never before had he killed in this manner, with planning and premeditated care, and hate.

Would this ghost attach itself to Miranda, were he to bring it ashore? Would it take hold of Thomas, who was barely more than ghost himself, to force him back into the abyss?

At six bells, waiting proved its own torture. Flint sought Gates to inform him that under no circumstances was he to be disturbed, and made his way to the stern, to his quarters. Gates’ eyes tracked him there, like a physical weight. What he thought, or what he saw, Flint could not fathom.

It was only when he saw Thomas, still alive and more than the imaginings of a man losing his grip on reality, that Flint felt himself capable of drawing breath. Were it not for all the time and death between them, or the worn thinness of Thomas’s wrists over the binding of _A General History of the Pyrates_ , Flint could almost pretend that they were back in London, on any insignificant morning, staggering about the uncharted territory of everyday intimacy.

The illusion only lasted a moment. Thomas was leaned against the desk, unshaven and in his shirtsleeves, collar loose and sleeves rolled up to the forearms, exposing livid twin bruises where he had been cuffed. He was looking through the papers strewn there with an idle, absent-minded interest; he put the _General History_ amongst them, as if not sure why he had taken it from the shelves in the first place. Flint made fast the door, but the words he had prepared, that had crowded in his throat last night with the crew watching, presently would not come. The sound of the lock turning made Thomas look up, and he spoke first.

“The last thing I remember,” he said, “is a man with the head of a wolf, speaking with the voice of the long dead. Your voice. I’m told such visions are a very common byproduct of opiates.” He paused, and his eyes were very flat and clear when he raised them to Flint, as if seeing a curious stranger. “Yet you are still here. I’ve gone fully mad, haven’t I?”

Flint stepped towards him. He thought of the way handlers approached hunting dogs taken by the rabies, with utmost care; but he could not tell who, between him and Thomas, was the mad one and who the handler.

Keeping track of Thomas’s hands gripping the edge of the desk, he said, “You’re not mad, my lord.”

The form of address made Thomas smile, very briefly. “I was told, in quite the lurid detail, of your death at sea. Killed by the dreaded Captain Flint, in fact. I was told a great many things. Your surgeon, too, had a lot to say — about him. About you.”

It was the first time he made reference to Flint’s assumed identity. The Walrus chose that moment to lurch against a wave, and the cabin swayed, with tortured creaks of wood and rope.

“We had word that you’d taken your life.” Another step forwards, but the distance seemed not to shrink. “I dared not hope,” Flint managed to say, around the imagined gravel in his mouth. It was not like Captain Flint, but rather an older affliction, that plagued James McGraw in moments where most he had wished to be articulate. A tightness, not only in his throat but constricting the ribcage. What a strange, strange thought: he had imagined James McGraw long decomposed, his bones long scattered.

He would have stood there quite mutely, lost in the enormity of the moment. It was larger than any dream or hope he might have harboured for the past five years, as he had slaughtered and deceived enough to fill the starved well of rage that was the only emotion he had had, after London.

Thomas took him by the wrists. The distance, for him, must have been immeasurably smaller; perhaps the Walrus’s rocking upon the waves helped him move forwards. James had well forgotten how tall he was, when not slouched over a desk or a monograph, or sprawling on a sofa or chair. He held James’s hands now as though seeking traces of the blood spilt, in his name. He turned both wrists in his grip, to survey the palms.

“The surgeon said I was the lone survivor. My father…?”

“I didn’t know you were aboard the Maria Aleyne. I came here for him; we received information that he was travelling anonymously on a ship bound for Charles Town. I made it quick,” James thought to add, seeing the conflict and undisguised pain in Thomas’s face. “Quicker than five years in prison. Quicker than dying,” he said, against the clench of his jaw, “for five years, piece by fucking piece. I thought you _gone_. Your father had it coming, and I won’t ask your forgiveness.”

As he spoke, Thomas’s fingers tightened about his wrists. The pain was tolerable; but James could not read Thomas’s expression, or the lines etched in the corners of his eyes.

“I’ll take an honest killer over a liar,” he said, with finality. “You never lied to me, even when you should have, for both our sakes.” The punishing grip lessened, but Thomas was yet to let go completely, as if unwilling to risk the scene before him to prove hallucinatory after all. After years in a prison or madhouse, James thought that anyone would come to doubt the evidence of their eyes.

Then Thomas nodded, and looked away, though not in surrender. His gaze was hard. James was not the only one who had changed. Out on the deck, a man yelled: his voice carried inside, muted and indecipherable, but if he had sighted sails bearing British or Spanish colours… Time, already, was running short. A ship offered no privacy or peace, and the Walrus had her own demands of James, her own anchor round his neck.

Still he could not help but prod at the wound. “I thought you’d be angrier.”

“In the last five years I think I’ve lost the capacity,” said Thomas. His gaze had grown unclear again. “ _That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and the tongue of thy dogs in the same_. Who am I to question His word?”

Shouting rose up once more, closer this time. James imagined Gates striding towards the cabin, more perceptive than any man should be who had learned to write in a run-down brothel in Nassau. Thomas heard the voices, too; he took hold of the back of James’s neck, ungently, to pull him close and press his forehead to James’s.

“We’ve all made our choices,” he said. His touch was searing; then, his mouth. “We’ve paid the price. We’ll take what comes.”

A rapping came at the door, determinedly followed by Morley’s voice: sails sighted to the southeast, British colours, and shall they pursue?

“I have found Nassau,” said James, moving away from Thomas despite the vestiges of animal fear — could this be real, after all? — “to be the kind of place that doesn’t care where one comes from, or what he’s done.”

Thomas only nodded. Still leaning on the desk, he could have been carved from pale and weathered stone, a paradox of unyielding strength that could be brought down with a single, well-placed crack. He said nothing, but watched with interest as James assembled his mask, and wrapped himself in the resolve that only a man borne of fiction and tragedy could possess, and walked out of the cabin without looking back, to take a spyglass from Gates and measure the Walrus’s chances and give the order to bring her to starboard, and not raise the black.

…

_February 12th, 1710_

_The Maria Aleyne was, according to Mr Gates, a ‘meaty little bitch of a brig’. He told me that he should like to have taken her, for her sixteen guns and manoeuvrability, but the Captain wished her burnt to embers and coal & so burn she did. There is not nearly enough in her hold to leave the crew happy. But now we have the long voyage home for him to reinvent this failure until they acquiesce, by force, although never will they know that force it is he uses. Force of his voice, force of his words._

_There are whispers amongst the men: that he is not wholly human, or that he has but a keyhole where his soul should go, between the ribs, so a witch may wind him up & send him to kill. I would scarcely credit such fanciful superstition, had I not sailed with him these last few months._

_We have lost four men to the Maria Aleyne, but three souls are only missing now, for there is the stowaway. No-one wishes to come near him, no-one that is save the Captain, who is hard pressed to be anywhere but. I had seen him after our return to the Walrus & thought that we would pay for this one, with blood or with coin, or with our right minds._

_Randall explained it to me thusly: ‘You don’t take ghosts onboard, Mr Dufresne. A sinking ship’s job is to die; ghosts only keep her spirit. Everyone knows it. The Captain knows it. His ghost, if he’s any wits about him, madman or no, will throw himself into the sea before we make land again.’_

 

**ii.**

“— ingenuous, it’s quite astonishing,” Thomas was saying, engrossed in a narrative to which James was not privy. When he talked, he talked with his hands, and his eyes were bright and alive. “And Avery came upon the idea organically, as something common-sense? And it worked?”

Gates nodded, ill-concealing his pleasure. He looked like a man lecturing a favoured nephew, but there was a self-aware and mocking humour lurking in the corners of his mouth, too.

“Two shares for the captain, one per crewman, and your chances of mutiny fall dramatically. Nassau ships used his council set-up ever since. These men, you know — they’re hungry, they’re greedy, they’re some of them mad, and each and every last one sick and tired of being ordered about and out-paid by men barely smarter than them. Present company excluded, of course.” This with another nod, to James in the doorway, leaned with his arms crossed and feet wide apart to ameliorate the Walrus’s uneven pitch. “He takes three shares.”

“I invest,” said James, without inflection. Death and cannon fire would not force him to tear his gaze from the sight of Thomas, sprawled in the captain’s chair with feigned — but skillfully feigned — ease.

“Mr Gates is giving me a primer, as it were, on the politics of Nassau.” Although he turned back to Gates, to speak to him directly, his attention remained fast on James. “What truly amazes me is the sheer expediency. There can’t be a man in naval service the world over whose pay is not in arrears, yet here you are, a God’s honest republic, running this operation with nary a hitch.”

James grinned, briefly, before Gates could spy it. “It does depend on taking from the rich and not giving to the poor.”

“It does depend on it, yes,” Thomas allowed.

“Some captains write receipts for the cargo they steal.”

“And are you amongst them, Captain?”

It was dangerous to think back to the time when they had spent, regularly, hours and hours in Thomas’s study arguing the minutiae of ethics as transposed onto duty and service and colonial navies. They had talked of piracy and faith in governments and the human need for equilibrium, of Locke and Hobbes and decency an inherent condition, of love.

All of it was still alive in Thomas, dulled and with edges sanded off, but to hear it in his voice: it was dangerous. For the answer to his question was that Captain Flint rarely left witnesses enough to account for any receipt.

The changes in them both were innumerable, and James knew — with a sick, twisting certainty — that were he, five years prior, somehow to see himself in the present, shame alone would kill him. Thomas had not lost the drive that made him so easy, so dreadfully easy, to believe; to trust; and to follow.

If he did not have it already, before the next bell Thomas might pluck from Gates the story of serving under Henry Avery as a cabin boy aboard the Charles II, moored at La Coruna. After that he would have — again: if he had it not already — Gates’ sympathy, then support. James remembered Miranda, as she had spoken of her husband, with a kind of undying light of inspiration; and how she had wished she could meet him again for the first time.

It was like the first taste of water after forty days and nights in the desert; to refuse it would be to die.

“Mr Gates,” said James, “a word, if you please.”

He became less and less as he walked away from the cabin, and from Thomas, to the aftcastle where they would not be overheard. It was full dark, and several men of the last dog watch were playing commerce with cards they must have taken from the Maria Aleyne: even at a distance one could see the blood and dirt spattered on them. Having left behind the parts of him that mattered, it was only Flint who said, “You seem to be getting along well enough, he and you.”

“The crew might think him mad, or only their golden ticket, but it’s rare enough you meet interesting people in this line of work.” Gates shrugged, bland and inscrutable, but watchful as always; he had unparallelled skill in reading people, and Flint wondered that none of his ambitions seemed to include captaining a ship of his own. “I like the novelty. You know him, don’t you? He’s familiar with you, where anyone else would be pissing himself in terror of Captain Flint.”

For a moment, Flint was silent. The sea clawed at the Walrus’s hull, insistent, like a jealous lover waiting to drag its rightful prize beneath the waves. “When we’d first met,” said Flint, measuring his words, “in that tavern in Nassau, I told you that within the month I’d have a ship and crew enough to weigh anchor. Do you remember, what you said to me then?”

“I’m surprised you do, given how drunk you were.”

He had been, certainly. It had only been Miranda’s connections and steel-eyed diplomacy that secured her the cottage on New Providence, and Flint — James — had been left with a newfound awareness of his own helplessness. It had seemed as good idea as any, to drink himself unconscious; it had been nothing but God’s idea of a lark to send Gates his way, in conflict with his then-captain, and willing to sway a portion of his crew to follow a promising and ruthless newcomer.

After another breath’s pause, and under Flint’s intent look, Gates sighed. “I said you struck me more as a dog without a master than as a man to hold the leash.”

There was nothing to add to it, but allow Gates to form his own conclusions: about Flint, and about Thomas. Nothing closer to the truth would pass Flint’s lips, when out at sea it would be madness to make himself vulnerable to manipulation by virtue of his claim to Thomas, or Thomas’s claim to him.

Gates nodded; not, quite, in understanding, but in acknowledgement of the trust placed in him.

Flint looked back to the men playing commerce. Someone cursed, but the sound of it was dulled and muted. “Three men are too ill to work,” he said. “According to Stapleton, they caught the night air. Witham and Geoff are bleeding from the mouth — scurvy, Stapleton thinks, and Moore’s gone down with dysentery.”

“Jesus.”

“I took them off the watch roster for now, and Moore should stay belowdeck before he gives the air to someone else. The last thing we need is for one of them to be taken by madness and turning on the crew.”

“Good, it’s never worth the risk,” said Gates, with a brisk nod. “I’ll get Randall to see if we have any barley malt about, and to assign them better rations. DeGroot could plot a course by one of the islands, to replenish our supplies —”

“No. We’re a week from Nassau. They will live.”

“They might not. I’ve seen men bleeding from the gums days before they died.”

“So have I,” said Flint. That he had seen such sights in the Royal Navy was incidental; he thought, even, that persistence of disease on navy ships was stronger than amongst pirates.

Any other quartermaster would have put it to a general vote: the crew would decide for themselves, whether they wished to keep sailing with three of them ill, or whether to resupply and bolster their chances with fresh food and clean water. But Gates was Flint’s quartermaster precisely because they had between them an understanding, and trust, as far as Flint could offer such a thing. If nothing else, Gates would be willing to cede responsibility as long as Flint took the inevitable blame.

…

The deck was crawling with rats, a roiling, skittering mass of them, and the sky above the gunwale was filthy and choked with fog. All was silent: no man spoke, or moved, or made himself known in another way; ropes swung from the masts, quite noiselessly, their creaking stifled at long last. Even the wood of the deck and hull gave no sign of motion upon the waves, no moans of stress or pressure. The bell was still, resistant to the breeze that brought aboard the smell of rot. All was still.

All but the sea, that boiled and shuddered even as no sound emerged: it beat at the hull, and sent up a freezing spray over the starboard, more biting than a lash.

Thomas stood before the helm, grey and indistinct and opaque as a revenant, his countenance a strange and unsettling mixture of presence and of memory: fine frock and waistcoat familiar from years past in London, but they were stained at the cuff and collar with red; he was unshaven and hollow-eyed. When he smiled, it was joyless.

A man knelt at his feet. Rats swarmed them both, nipping at stockings, shoes, tearing fabric to get to the flesh beneath.

Thomas held a knife. He gripped the blade, so that it cut into his palm, and the cut bled rust that found intricate passageways in the texture of skin before it dripped, dripped, dripped to the deck, a feast for the rats. Thomas offered the knife to James, hilt-first. The man at his feet began to weep. The man at his feet was his father, or Peter, or Gates; or Thomas, five years prior; or Flint. Recognition slipped from James’s fingers whenever he grasped at familiarity, until he woke, with a strangled noise and the taste of copper on his tongue.

He felt the touch of something cold and dry upon his neck, and the tangle of his shirt became a prison from which he emerged with a knife, reacting fully on an animal’s preservation instinct.

A clatter, a gasp echoed twofold, and he was astride Thomas’s chest with the blade pressed to Thomas’s throat, crosswise, the deck hard beneath his knees and the moment slowed to a trickle, ticking past as James fought to breathe, and think.

The cabin was bathed in the same shade of featureless grey as the nightmare, as if its fog had leaked into the waking world, along with the dread that was now coiled beneath the outermost layers of James’s skin. He remembered the rats that had swarmed Thomas, and the knife: it could have been the same knife he presently held to Thomas’s neck. Was it?

Thomas stared at him, wide awake and unafraid. He arched his neck, so that the blade dug into flesh, beneath his adam’s apple. The knife’s edge, corroded from rust and use, caught and finally drew blood. And then Thomas took hold of James’s wrist, his touch cool and resolute, and pulled it aside. James dropped the knife, fingers gone numb with shock. It gave a small, dull thud against the wood of the deck.

He found his voice with effort. “Are you hurt?”

“I can’t say I wasn’t warned,” said Thomas, with the crooked shadow of a smile. Curious, he touched the nick at his throat, and examined the tips of his fingers, that came away bloody.

“Thomas.”

“No, I’m unhurt.”

The desk creaked against its fastenings, and the bulkheads similarly gave strained protest at the pressure of the sea outside. Nothing was silent, onboard a ship; nothing was still. It could not have been later than the morning watch’s first bell.

Thomas’s calm was infectious, if not wise, but it made the dread bleed out of James, slowly, as if drained by leeches.

A hammock even in a captain’s cabin was not fit to be shared between two men, and James felt rather ridiculous for having fallen out of it, dragging Thomas with him, startled by a dream. In the early light, it seemed nothing but superstition and fancy; or perhaps he was going mad. He put his thumb to the shallow cut at Thomas’s throat.

“I didn’t mean to do that.”

For a moment, Thomas’s smile was a thing pulled directly from a time long past: bright, cavalier. He said, “Now you have me wondering, what other kinds of sharp objects do you bring to bed these days?”

“If we’re counting wit, then ideally just you.”

It startled Thomas into laughing; he put his hands to the back of James’s neck and brought him close, to kiss him so James could taste that laughter. How long it must have been, since the last time he had felt anything like it: a kiss not tinged with regret or desperation, naught but simple human affection and love that came with no conditions, no ghost always watching from a corner.

Now there was a score of them, shapeless spectres bearing witness at the far edges of his sight as he went for the fastenings of Thomas’s shirt, and Thomas tore at James’s breeches to take him in hand, graceless with need.

James saw the ghosts when he shut his eyes, drowned and drenched, slipping closer, and the blood that soaked into wood. For the moment, with Thomas intent on driving him to distraction until they were both unmade, he could practise a lie: that Thomas alone had the power to wash the demons, the murder, the sin from James’s hands so they might be clean at last.

Afterwards they sat opposite one another at the desk, slouched and easy, and the sense of something seen and felt before was overwhelming. How many times had they done just that, in Thomas’s study, with shelves piled with books and monographs that never needed dusting, for they were all in regular use? The endless, circular arguments, held for their own pleasure, that had led to the bedroom as often as they did not. _Who could refrain, that had a heart to love; and in that heart courage to make ’s love known_ ; and Thomas’s quiet, caustic smile.

But the deck beneath them swayed over a temperamental sea, and the creak and moan of it was such that they had to speak more loudly than would suit real privacy. The captain’s cabin had a paltry offering of books; most of them missing pages, stained with rust or misshapen by saltwater.

Thomas spoke of revenge the way he had spoken of reform and prosperity: with an unshakeable belief in the righteousness of his choices, and inevitability of success. Once, that certainty had been rooted in naive faith. Now he understood the value and advantage of having Flint at his side. He held one thumb pressed to his lower lip, not quite lost in thought.

“He won’t be amenable to negotiation,” James insisted. “Thomas, his vendetta against pirates is known all across the Caribbean. Some won’t consider approaching Charles Town at all.”

“He won’t be amenable to negotiation with a pirate. He might be open to dialogue with me.” Thomas grinned, showing teeth. Then the expression melted, and James looked away so he would not see what replaced it. “And you forget he has no reason to think my father dead.”

“You can’t mean to impersonate your father to Peter Ashe.”

“I could. But perhaps I shouldn’t.” He sighed, and pushed his fingers against his eyes, as if to banish a headache. “I have rights to a title that is of no use, and an earldom that I care for even less. You need that ransom money, and I have unfinished business with Peter. If he fears exposure for his part in what happened, then he’ll pay. I need only the support of a legitimate third party to twist his arm.”

Outside, there was a good-natured shout from one sailor to another, and laughter in response. The night was a fair one, and the moon’s thin face was reflected a thousandfold across the waves, their gentle shiver; the Walrus dozed with her crew, calm for the moment and almost safe, a lonely spot of life upon the silent vastness of the ocean.

James watched the light from the oil-lamps tremble as the ship moved. He said, “There is a merchant family in Boston, who sent one of their sons to Nassau. It was before my time, but he’s still there, and he’s made himself a small empire: he buys from pirates, at an absurd rate, and sells the cargoes to merchants who don’t care too much for their provenance.”

“Boston… I believe my father had dealings with a Guthrie in Nassau. And he would agree to help you?”

“Since Edward Teach left Nassau, I account for most of the goods he obtains. He will agree.”

Thomas leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. His mouth thinned, but he smiled faintly, and when he looked again to James it was with a kind of satisfaction. He had been so hopeful, once; so full of faith. Now, illuminated by the uneven oil-light and as much subject to the sea’s whim as any sailor, there was a calculated flatness to his gaze. James would have to grow used to it.

Then he exhaled, and with it his shoulders sagged, and the ruthless edge was gone from his posture. “Thank you,” he said. “I don’t want to compromise your position in Nassau, or your standing amongst the other crews. I imagine it all must be very tenuous between lawless men.”

“I was ready to raze an empire to the ground when I thought you dead,” said James, despite the tightness in his throat. “Do you think there is anything I wouldn’t do for you alive? You need only ask. This” — he cast a glance about the cabin, its dimness and noise, the mild pitch of the deck; and he thought of the crew outside, thought of men he had sent to their deaths in service of a cause not their own — “is temporary. It’s a means to an end. But now I know that there is an end, that there is a life on the other side of all this.”

“And Nassau does not care for one’s past or deeds.”

James looked down. He had thought Thomas might not remember those words, and their first conversation; paregoric tended to take time to wear off. Honesty was as mortifying as it was hazardous, but Thomas always dragged it out of him, and never made him regret it.

“It’s not what we thought it would be,” James said, ashamed to find his voice hoarse. “It’s broken, and harsh, but it’s forgiving. And it is freedom, for as long as someone is ready to fight for it.”

…

The weather turned alongside the moon, and its tide brought hail and cold the likes of which James recalled from the perilous waters of the Western Approaches, where four navy warships had been wrecked not three years prior. The water changed colour to reflect the sky’s steel, and where once a man might see colonies of fish deep underwater, lit as if from beneath by strange submarine reflections, now there was only an impenetrable dark.

One of the men taken with scurvy had fallen asleep and failed to wake, though his heart had not stopped. Stapleton had deemed it a merciful way to spend the remainder of the voyage; he spent most of his time administering cold compresses for Witham’s unceasing fever. Geoff seemed more sturdy, and had taken to trading jibes with the other men, pleased at being spared watch duty.

Moore’s body they had returned to the sea wrapped in tarp, tied with rope and weighed with stones, so that he would not drift but rather plummet directly to the seafloor: a solitary stygian grave. He had succumbed four days away from Nassau, having lost so much weight he had appeared skeletal by the end; and James had taken the silent fury with which Gates looked at him, after they had consigned the body to the waves.

Two days to Nassau he found Thomas leaning against the rail, watching the plunge into choppy waters beneath with the intense focus of a man measuring how long it might take him to fall, and whether that fall would kill him upon impact.

“Your crew avoid me,” he said, without turning, at James’s approach.

“My crew are as superstitious as anyone else who leaves his life at the mercy of the sea,” said James. He leaned besides Thomas, his back to the gunwale as he kept an eye on his men further away. “They think you’re mad, and it’s ill luck to take a madman aboard.”

“They think that, really?”

“There were letters amongst the things we found on the Maria Aleyne. One mentioned your stay at Bedlam; there were few other conclusions for the men to draw, and I couldn’t exactly defend your honour without risking more questions.”

“I suppose that would be my father’s letter of recommendation, to whomever is in charge of the penal colony where I was to live out my life.”

James looked to Thomas, but found his profile blank and unreadable as he stared into the murky horizon. “You knew about it?”

“People tell you more than they should when you are barely lucid with opiates.” Thomas turned away from the water, as though tired of the sight, and the movement left him standing closer to James than he had been. James recalled how permissive he had been in private once, how straightforward with his affection.

They had shared sleeping quarters every night, middle to forenoon watch. Still there was a well of distance between them, paved with ruin and forced change, that only time would mend. Although, James thought, revenge would not hurt their case. And from starboard there came a noise, that he should not have been able to hear, and so knew it illusory: the tapping of a fine cane against wood, impatient, fastidious. Was the echo carried from beyond the gunwale only sea-song, or a woman weeping?

With an inward start James realised that Thomas stood in the exact spot in which he had stood in James’s dream, in every dream that had pulled at the threads of his rationality since the Maria Aleyne, trying to unravel him. A few stray drops of rain found their way onto the deck, falling at an inopportune angle: if a hail rose up, it would pelt them horizontally, as was most dangerous. The rain felt like hot oil upon James’s face, slick and scalding.

Randall passed them on his way to the galley, with a “Captain,” for Flint and a tip of an invisible hat for Thomas. “Good day, Randall,” said Thomas carefully. Then, to James: “There’s one, aside from Mr Gates, who doesn’t think me haunted. Fond of madmen, is he?”

“Fond of getting paid.”

…

_February 20th, 1710_

_May the good Lord help me: the death cannot stand. Mr Gates is completely deaf to possibility of bringing charges against Flint, but I have spoken to Mr Morley, & he had quite the story to tell, & now I must entertain the possibility that Mr Gates is not as fair a quartermaster as we had thought, nor nearly as impartial. & so I have brought my doubts not to him but to Randall, who is even-headed in a crisis and to whom the men turn in their darkest hours, when it is of essence that their troubles remain secret._

_He was shocked to hear of Flint’s treachery; he is, or wishes to be, I think, loyal. But we have all seen Flint cast lives to the mercy of the sea, unheeding and uncaring, for his own gain. Randall bade me wait, & consider all options, & most importantly hold fast as the transactions are completed to ransom Flint’s madman._

_But the madman is his own enigma, that I grow now increasingly certain holds sway over the Captain. He is familiar, & presumptuous, & fearless in his dealings with the men, which leads me to believe him not only very sane: but also certain that Flint would not see him come to harm._

_I have no-one in my camp but Mr Morley. Flint has Mr Gates, whom I love as a father; and Randall, who is honourable. And he has the madman, who has burrowed into the fabric of our crew, and who I fear most of all might be used to bring us all to ruin._

 

**iii.**

“I’m sorry about this,” James murmured, quite low, only for Thomas to hear. The clink of metal bolts sliding into place seemed unbearably loud to him, and obscene for it. The cuffs went round his wrists in just the places the ones that had him chained aboard the Maria Aleyne had, covering barely-healed welts and scraping new ones in their place.

Thomas only looked at him, his gaze steady. “I know.” A shadow fell across his face, from the patched sails, but his eyes were bright. Lucid. Alive. He watched the change in James, as he wreathed himself in the skin of a stranger.

The crew milled about them in the last vestiges of sunlight, running the gauntlet of preparing all of their cargo to be unloaded, alongside the scraps and accruements from the Maria Aleyne, her papers and books and whatever sails had not been torn beyond repair by cannonballs, anything that could fetch a price. The deck was littered with crates and barrels and weapons.

It was, truthfully, controlled chaos. Thomas had watched it with open fascination, and helped where he could and where his assistance was welcome. But Flint had arranged it so that they would be rowed ashore first, taking advantage of priority and seniority; the Walrus would be left in Gates’ care, and the men would need bide their time until formal arrangements could be made for the ransom.

Until then, Thomas would be his hostage: or, at the least, present the illusion of one.

He got into the rowboat readily enough, with Flint’s hand keeping him steady under one arm so he would not lose his balance. Flint thought with abject revulsion of his name written down in the Maria Aleyne’s manifest: chattel property. The wrongness of it made his skin crawl anew, as did Thomas’s acquiescence. He remained calm and pliant, smiling softly as though in some private amusement. But the tremor in his hands was betrayed by the small noises that the cuffs made, metal on metal, the hollow chime like fear.

It was fully dark by the time they reached the shore, the hot night punctuated with cook-fires and torchlight, illuminating the warren of tents erected on the beach by crew after crew after crew, beginning with Henry Avery years prior.

Soon enough sand would be barely visible beneath piled cargo, ferried from the Walrus. Chests and barrels of gunpowder, salt, remainder of their freshwater; crates filled with shot; dried meat, long gone mouldy and horrid, to be disposed of; bales of silk and damask from the Maria Aleyne; and then all else that would leave the Walrus stripped bare like a skeletal husk, awaiting her next voyage: anchor and tackle, piled and bound sails, cannon and ammunition and weapons.

The Walrus men were quick, proficient and needed no supervision. It took very little time to secure horses and make sure the crew knew to expect their captain’s return upon the morrow.

As soon as they were out of sight of the beach, on the dust road that led further inland, now dark, James stopped to unchain Thomas. All who would benefit from seeing the spectacle had seen it, and thought whatever they might. After a full eight days in the Walrus’s company, they might even believe that Thomas wished to stay on New Providence. To their knowledge he was, after all, a madman.

The clatter of hooves came then, and the fainter creak and rattle of wood upon the dirt: a cart, hand-drawn. A woman’s voice, quietly directing, “Easy. Easy.”

Thomas stood as unmoving as Lot’s wife turned to salt when Miranda came into view, illuminated by moonlight and nothing else. She stopped a distance from them, and took herself from the cart, petting her mare with absent-minded gentleness as she dropped the horse’s reins. She did not watch them fall. She had not expected to see anyone but Flint alone.

All was still within James as she approached, until he could see her quite well: eyes widening in recognition, pale and shining with reflected light; and next to him Thomas, wound tight with emotion, drawing breath only to let it out in a shallow exhale.

It was Miranda who spoke first, blind to James’s presence. “Oh,” she said, in a voice so broken that it seemed a miracle she had strength to cross the last ten feet of distance between them. “Oh, my love, _Thomas_.” And she covered her mouth, to keep herself from crying aloud.

They met in an embrace that must have hurt them both. Miranda wept, then laughed, choked and tinged with hysteria and wild joy, and perhaps disbelief, held by Thomas and holding him in turn. James thought that if one were to let go, they would both collapse. In the pale moonlight he saw Miranda’s fingers clenched in the linen of Thomas’s shirt, so tightly that the knuckles were drained of blood and stood out whitely. He took a step back, unwilling to overhear their conversation, quiet and halting as it was.

His presence seemed enough like an intrusion; they deserved all the privacy he could grant them. So he stood apart, as a stray might creep close to a fire to soak in its borrowed warmth.

A remote part of him felt equal measures jealousy and relief: for Miranda said and did all that he had wished to, in that moment aboard the Maria Aleyne, watched by his crew and so rendered helpless beneath Captain Flint’s mask.

When they moved apart, James turned his gaze from the sight of Miranda so undone: hair freshly tangled, face wet with tears, so unladylike and girlishly unbothered by it that the alienness made colour rise in James’s cheeks. Thomas fared no better. He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes, pushed his hands through his hair, but they returned to Miranda, seeking confirmation: she was not a dream.

“James,” she said, and then nothing at all for a long breath. She smiled. Her hand lay upon Thomas’s collar bone, mirroring his own touch. “Thank you.”

She could not have thought that James did it for her, but he answered her smile, turned it towards Thomas. “I have business to attend to, if you’d prefer… I can be back tomorrow,” he finished, clumsiness dripping in-between the words.

“Don’t be absurd.” Miranda shook her head, but did not reach for him, as though ceding those gestures to Thomas. “You’ve been gone a fortnight. Besides, you can’t mean to tell me you would rather be anywhere else.”

“I —”

“Stay,” Thomas said. The single word had the weight of an anchor, but James would gladly allow it to drag him to the bottom of the sea, and drown without complaint. He stayed.

It was another hour’s mark before they were settled in Miranda’s cottage, far enough inland that the ocean was only a phantom known but unseen, present in the shrieks of gulls by day and a whisper of distant waves under the moonlight.

James saw to the horses and his weapons, hiding Thomas’s cuffs amongst the tack. Inside he lit lamps and made the door fast; Miranda boiled water and brewed tea, all with shaking hands, the enormity of her relief almost physical. Had the same relief been as visible on James, for all to see? It must have been.

Thomas walked the little house corner to corner, measured its width and breadth and surveyed all that was to be seen: few mementos, fewer luxuries, traces of a life long buried, sanded to a polished but almost unrecognisable edge. It struck James how poor, how awful it all must have seemed. A drab life stitched together from stop-gap half-measures.

He followed Thomas into the smaller bedroom, that usually was his own, to see him trace books stacked upon the scant shelves with his fingers, then pause at a particular one.

“You kept it,” he said, in a strange voice.

James did not need to see which book Thomas meant. “It’s the only thing I’d taken from London. It’s the only thing I’d cared to take.”

It would have been humiliating to mention the state in which he had left London, or that it was Miranda who secured their funds for the voyage, after she had had to vacate her home in solitary anguish, taking barely more than she could carry. James kept quiet. He watched Thomas thumb open the book’s cover and grow even more still. Could he see, James wondered, fingerprints upon the title page, the sun-worn ink?

In all their time since the Maria Aleyne, James had not seen Thomas broken, or even close to it. He saw him now, and saw in him grief torn open like a badly-healed scab, revealing unmended flesh and blood welling in the crevice.

“I never wanted any of this to happen,” he said, before James could move towards him and offer some misbegotten comfort. “And yet — I’m glad. Glad that you and Miranda are here. Glad that I am. God help me, I am even glad that my father is dead.” He sounded wretched. He shut the cover of _Meditations_ and replaced it on the shelf, and pressed his palms together as if in prayer, and said, “How many people have you killed?”

James could not be certain whether it was him or Captain Flint that answered: “I’ve lost count.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Not enough to want to take any of it back. Do you see?” He stepped fully into the room, and turned Thomas by the arm, until he stood facing James. “They would call me a monster for what I’ve done. But God doesn’t punish monsters, and He doesn’t reward good men. No-one gets justice, unless they take it or deliver it themselves.”

“I don’t know if I can accept that. I have to believe there is a reason for all this. Otherwise…” His voice drifted off, his gaze fixed over James’s shoulder. But he wavered, and in place of conviction all James heard in his tone was the last of his faith, decomposing.

“There don’t have to be reasons,” said James. He ignored the sounds at the very edges of his hearing: the tapping of a cane, a sob, the skittering of rats beneath the floorboards. They were illusory. In the other room, china clinked. “I broke every law that England chained us with, and perhaps they’re right, perhaps it makes me a monster. But it also makes me _free_. This is Nassau, Thomas. You once said it was a gift, and this is that gift: freedom. No laws, no monsters.”

“And no good men?”

“You’re here.”

“A few others, too.” Miranda’s voice. Thomas looked to the doorway, where she stood with her hands folded, haloed from the back by the main room’s oil-light falling at an angle. She looked almost composed, though her breath was not quite even. “But that can come later. Tea’s ready, and I assume you have plans in place; I’d like to hear them.”

None of them would sleep for long hours, and James found himself glad for it, as it neatly circumvented the worry he had nurtured beneath his breastbone, when he had first realised — two bedrooms, three persons, and Thomas poised between lover and wife. They had made all the wrong choices in London, when James had thought he had had a claim to Thomas that Miranda never could and had mistakenly thought her happy.

By morning it would not matter; they would be off to pay Richard Guthrie a visit at his tavern.

In the end James retired first, with the night beginning to fade into a featureless grey, the past fortnight’s worth of exhaustion finally leaving its mark. He stepped into an odd, detached state of fugue from which Thomas woke him with a hand upon his shoulder, and bade him rest.

So it was from listless sleep that James was roused by the tapping of a cane against wood, and thought it strange how the noise echoed before he remembered that he was no longer aboard a ship. The house was empty but for the skittering and scratching beneath the floorboards, tiny, vile sounds. Light filtered in through the windows at unsettling angles; its colour, too, seemed wrong.

The front door creaked as it swung shut, very slowly, as though of its own volition.

But it was not that which sent James’s heart thudding in his chest, choking his breath: it was the digested, clotting blood bubbling up from beneath the floorboards, seeping in-between the cracks, black and red. It smelled pungently of copper and of rotting meat. And something reaching for him, from the dark recesses of shadow in the corner of the room, that he knew was nothing other than his own hands; James Flint’s hands.

He woke with Thomas’s hand upon his face, to the sight of sleepless bruises beneath his eyes. The other side of the bed was cold, so James pulled Thomas towards him, to steal whatever shreds of warmth with which Thomas might be willing to part. For the remainder of his life, James thought, or for however long Thomas would have him, touching him would feel like it had the first time.

The floorboards creaked only with their customary weariness as James eventually got up to make ready for their return journey to Nassau town, and for the moment, between Thomas and Miranda and the future, he would happily take any ghost as a price.

…

Nassau was chaos: more than when Flint had left the beach, and more than was its wont. A strange tension permeated its narrow, winding streets; the dust, that tended to stick to any surface and took a particular liking to sweaty human skin, seemed more heavy than usual. The people, too, moved without a readily apparent purpose. What pirates Flint could spy — McLeod’s quartermaster haggling for whale oil; and by the food stalls Mr de Vere, from the Gilgamesh, boatswain to whomever captained her now that the crew had hanged Lynes — were a little too quick to avoid his eye.

He led Thomas through the alleys towards the beach, and was glad that no-one paid them undue attention. No longer cuffed, in Flint’s spare clothes — wearing the same coat in which James McGraw had arrived to Nassau, its sleeves too short; he had rolled them back, to mid-forearm, and the sight of his naked wrists would have been so improper in London, so vulgar — Thomas drew the eye only as a stranger might in a place so insular as Nassau. Even that was ameliorated by Flint by his side: he would not, after all, be seen in the presence of an enemy to pirates. Thomas walked with his head held high, next to Flint and not even a half-step behind him, certain of his welcome or willing to brave violence.

Even before they made it back onto the beach, before Flint could search for his flag wherever the men had decided to take up temporary residence, Gates materialised out of the dust and smoke of the Guthrie tavern and made a clear line for Flint and Thomas, as if he had been waiting for them.

“Finally, he deigns to show his face. Where the fuck have you been?” Gates’ voice did not carry far, but still he glared at a man passing by, to hurry him along.

By his tone, Flint knew to expect bad news. He felt Thomas tense next to him. “I said I’d be back on the morrow. What’s happening?”

“What’s happening,” Gates parroted. “What’s happening is that Nassau’s gone ass over kettle, and Dufresne called council to bring charges against you, for negligence and acting against the crew’s interest.”

“Charges,” said Thomas, quite disbelieving; but, of course, he had little idea about the intricacies of pirate law.

Gates only spared him a look, before returning the force of his glare to Flint. “Mr Morley saw you, on the Maria Aleyne. He saw what you did; he heard the _begging_ , Jesus Christ. Now he and Mr Dufresne have themselves convinced we lost five men so you could settle some score, either for your madman” — he nodded at Thomas, putting emphasis on that word, ‘ _your_ madman,’ and Flint felt his spine draw straighter in response — “or for someone else.”

For a moment, there was only silence. Flint ran through possibilities: what would appeal to the men most, and what Gates would find plausible as an explanation. Before he could settle on a strategy, Thomas shifted, very slightly, beside him. He assumed a stance with his feet wider apart, that Flint recognised as a fencing position.

“Well, they are right, of course,” he said briskly, nonchalance so crisp his voice leaked starch. “Captain Flint had undertaken a mission that required extreme subtlety; but all in service of his crew. You asked where we were, Mr Gates: we were in the interior, in the house of the woman who gave Captain Flint the lead concerning the Maria Aleyne. A woman who, to compensate your losses, is going to pay nineteen shillings per crewman while we wait for the ransom.”

“A month’s worth of Navy wages.”

“Just so. Please, pass that word along to the crew. I would hate for there to be misunderstandings on my account, or accusations of the captain shirking his duty to his men, where he had done anything but.”

Gates turned to Flint, with a horrible, disbelieving hope. “Nineteen shillings per man would certainly go a long way to appeasing the monkey court. That woman, she’s really good for it?”

Flint had no idea whether Miranda might be able to scrounge up enough funds to cover such an expense; he supposed Thomas and she agreed to it as a form of loan, that they would see a return with the ransom money. Nineteen shillings per man would amount to an excess of thirty pounds. Flint knew that Miranda had taken as much as she could from London without appearing to rob Alfred Hamilton’s own house, but he had not known she had so much ready cash at hand as opposed to in bonds or promissory notes.

“She’s good for it,” he said, praying that it were true. And before Gates could begin to wonder how involved Thomas would be in his own ransom exchange — “Now I’d like to know what the fuck’s happened in Nassau while we were at sea.”

Gates tossed him a thin, grim smile. “Yeah, about that. Let’s go inside, and you’ll see for yourself.”

“I need to speak to Richard first.”

But, inexorably, Gates herded him and Thomas back to the tavern, from whence he had come. “Like I said: you’ll see for yourself.” And he left, to attend whatever business he deemed most pressing. Mutiny, perhaps. It always did seem that as soon as he set his feet on land, Flint found himself juggling a score of concurrent disasters, large and small and all working against him.

Inside was no more readily enlightening than outwith. Men and women milled about, strangely tense and subdued, but beer and rum ran as freely as ever, and — as ever, too, since the first and only time Flint had shed blood there, to place himself at the top of whatever pack of feral wolves the town considered a hierarchy — at the sight of Flint several voices quieted. The effect was of a sudden hush fallen upon the customers. It lasted only a moment: a heartbeat, another, and conversation began to rise again.

Flint felt rather than heard Thomas at his flank, not a step behind; perhaps he, too, knew the necessity of establishing a position in Nassau in relation to Captain Flint as an equal, not a subordinate. First impressions might shape his tenure on the island, for however long he stayed.

Flint saw the Guthrie slave, Scott, first. He stood at the bar, nursing a pint of beer or something more vile. Next to him was his charge, barely tall enough to place her elbows upon the bar-top but still somehow seeming taller than Flint had remembered her a fortnight back, bundled in rough skirts and shirtsleeves that must have been re-sewn from garments intended for a man.

“Mr Scott,” said Flint, and saw both Scott and Eleanor tense before turning. “Miss Guthrie, I should like to speak to your father. Urgently.”

“Whatever you wish to say to my father, you can say to me.” She nodded to Thomas, imperious but all bluster: she glanced at Scott, first. Deferential, but very grudging about it. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“No,” said Thomas pleasantly, “we have not. I’m a friend of Richard’s.”

She glanced, once more, to Scott. Scott shook his head, and said, all rounded consonants and wariness, “I am familiar with Mr Guthrie’s contacts and associates, but I don’t know you.”

“You may know my father, then. Or you should.” Thomas inclined his head, unsmiling. He was not the man that Flint had known to charm a salon of peers, articulate and so very convincing in his faith for a better world. He was someone new, sharp-teethed and unflinching, someone just as worth dying for. “He is, after all, one of the Lords Proprietor to the Carolina colony, including the Bahama Islands, including this very spit of sand and wretched piracy: the fourth Earl of Ashbourne, Lord Alfred Hamilton. Does that ring any bells, Mr…Scott, was it?”

Scott stared. Eleanor, likewise, seemed incapable of speech. In the pregnant silence that followed Thomas’s words, Flint had the satisfying thought that he could not have orchestrated the meeting better.

“I know Lord Hamilton,” Scott allowed, at long last; and elaborated, at Eleanor’s beseeching look: “He has been a business partner to Mr Guthrie for many years, and one of his contacts in London society. We have not had word, however, that his son might visit New Providence Island.”

Thomas’s expression remained opaque throughout, but Flint thought that he could spy the beginnings of a plan taking shape behind his eyes, to which he hoped he would be made privy, soon enough. “That would be on account of his untimely death,” Thomas said, “news of which I am sure will reach Mr Guthrie soon. I should like to deliver it myself, out of respect for their friendship.”

“Captain Flint.” Eleanor’s voice rang out more surely than a girl’s of her stature should. She held herself together, seemingly, with spite and will alone; she had been twelve when Flint had first arrived in Nassau, not yet bearing the name, and now she was seventeen, with shadows beneath her eyes fit to match Thomas’s. “Do you vouch for this man?” she asked, gaze fixed upon Flint and no-one else.

“I do.”

She nodded, and said, “Then I shall trust your judgement, and hold you personally accountable if I find my faith misplaced,” and then her shoulders slumped for a fraction of a moment before she poured steel back into the column of her spine. She came up to Flint’s chin, in unladylike shoes that made her look taller, though no less breakable. “I was serious when I told you that you could say to me what you’d say to my father. Gentlemen, as of last week my father is no longer on New Providence Island, and no longer concerned with the daily business of running this shit-strewn pigsty.”

Thomas blinked at her uncouth language, and almost, despite the gravity of the situation, smiled.

“Mr Scott and I are now the sole holders of the Guthrie estate in Nassau: I am in charge of the trade between the crews and my father and his merchant network, in charge of our warehouses, and in charge of…this.” She waved one hand about, indicating the tavern at large, its stooping wooden columns and peeling whitewash upon the walls. For all that her father had fashioned a kingdom in bribes and trade interest, it seemed now to limp, and quite pathetically.

Yet, despite that, possibility spread through Flint like opium, swift and intoxicating: he caught Thomas’s eye and willed him to see their future writ large in a partnership with an aspiring queen of thieves, saw a kind of wild hope reflected in Thomas’s gaze. To Eleanor he said, “So you find yourself in need of a captain who would lead by example, and help you establish yourself as someone to be reckoned with. A captain who would not only trade with you, but enforce your monopoly on that trade. And with Teach gone…”

“I’m aware of your standing amongst the other crews and their captains, yes.”

“Then if we are to help each other, _ma’am_ , we should talk about the particular matter of a ransom.”

…

_To_  
_The Right Honourable Lord Peter Ashe,_  
_Governor to the Carolina Colony,_  
_In Charles Town:_

_Lord Ashe, it is my hope that this letter finds you well. You may not know me, and indeed I believe you do not; but circumstances soon to be revealed will, I trust, assure you of my intentions being true. I write to you having been implored to do so, at great personal risk, by a man who you have once called friend._

_It is my tragic duty to inform you, therefore, of the cruel fate that has befallen a man of great renown, and friend to us both, the fourth Earl of Ashbourne, Lord…_

…

In the end, Thomas’s resolution seemed immeasurably swift. Without much argument — seeing the benefit of such a partnership and both necessity of the ransom money to change hands, with the added benefit of unsettling Peter in his ivory tower built upon traitorous foundations — Eleanor agreed to pen the letter that would reach Charles Town. It would paint the picture of nobly suffering Lord Thomas Hamilton, taken hostage by a wholly fictitious crew that had slain his father; Thomas Hamilton who, in his fear-addled delirium, thought the governor of Carolina his only salvation and let slip unfortunate details of the events that had compelled his secret and unfinished journey to Charles Town.

Those unfortunate details, the letter promised, would be kept as close to Eleanor Guthrie’s heart as honour demanded. But, of course, she could not free Lord Hamilton from the pirate crew’s dastardly clutches on her own; and a display of goodwill from the governor would be most helpful. Likewise, that goodwill — monetary goodwill, the truest kind — would certainly assure that Lord Hamilton would be brought to Charles Town upon his release, post-haste, so that the governor may do with him as he should like.

Scott watched the plan taking colourful shape with a mixture of mounting amusement and mortification. “You cannot think that the governor of Carolina will take kindly to being blackmailed,” he said, at last.

“And risk exposure?” Thomas very briefly let his eyes drift shut, and smiled, a hanged man’s half smile, embracing the noose. “My father had influence enough to bend reality to his will. Peter shared it, while he had my father’s gratitude. Now all Peter has is his good name and reputation. If he doesn’t take kindly to blackmail, then he will find that neither will his creditors take kindly to the truth. He knows I have no good name left to lose; a scandal can’t hurt me.”

“And if the governor of Carolina manages to convince whatever Navy presence he has at hand to seek revenge?” Eleanor asked, even as she waved the written pages of her letter in the air, so the ink might dry.

“Then he’ll find a fort armed to the teeth,” said Flint, smiling grimly, “and at least one rigger waiting at anchor to take him on. But if he’s stupid enough to involve the Navy, I won’t be the only one willing to defend our freedom.”

Eleanor seemed convinced but intensely curious; she had what details she needed to be made agreeable, but not the exact circumstances of Thomas’s strange exile. And it must have seemed strange, to have an English lord in her tavern, weathered by five years of grief and dressed like a pirate, in a coat with too-short sleeves and boots that he had not been the one to break, with Flint at his flank ardent as a foxhound.

Rumours, Flint knew, would soon follow: his crew must already have suspected what they would about the madman, whom they called Flint’s, and Nassau was a pit of gossip and festering ill-blood that would snatch at all that could be used against a man. But watching Thomas presently, oratory politics and persuasion his first calling now realised in the service of low-simmering rage that he shared with Flint, with James, a tie separate from love but just as binding… Watching him, Flint found that he cared very little for whatever rumours might spring up, for he could see plainly that neither of them needed protection.

The worst that could have happened, already had. Nassau could be their absolution, or it could burn; and Flint would take the sick-smelling anchor of guilt weighing him down to the seafloor, he would take the noises late at night and his hungry ghosts seeping blood through the boards of his right mind; the rats, scrambling for purchase in the waking world. The real deaths that dogged him, even of those past few days: the carpenter’s mate and his wide-open unseeing eyes, Moore dehydrated beyond the threshold of survival and left a dried husk of bones and terror. Alfred Hamilton, the murder that could have been averted had Flint only checked the other hold cabin aboard the Maria Aleyne and known there had been no death to avenge.

Flint would take them all, and gladly, until he did not need to use the name and could lay Captain Flint to rest at the bottom of the ocean, from whence he had crawled out and where he belonged, amongst corpses and fury and lies. Bury him there, beneath the waves, with his horror and his vengeance, so James McGraw might pick at the threads unravelled by Flint’s passing and tie them back together, stitched into a life worth sharing: far inland, untroubled, and home from the sea.

 

**epilogue**

_Dearest Thomas —_

_It should not surprise me to find Boston quite so dreary, but it does, for it is. I have grown used to the unceasing summer of the Bahamas, and now winter catches me unaware. I have not known myself to miss snow until I saw it again, last week._

_Yet I cannot remain contrite, for the city is all that I was promised, too, and all that we had hoped it would be. I was most pleased to make the acquaintance of the elder Mrs Guthrie, come from Philadelphia — and she, I believe, is quite thrilled at the possibility of establishing a business partnership with you and I. As James had suspected, she will give us her support covertly, so as to plausibly disclaim all accusations of abetting piracy; but it is clear to me that an idea of a self-governing, self-sustaining Nassau has piqued her interest._

_It is refreshing, as well, to confer with a woman in a position such as hers: a unique individual, and a true inspiration. Her successes alone give me hope for my own endeavours here in Boston, and for our partnership; hers and mine, hers and ours, but ultimately, most of all, mine and yours._

_I hope to see you within the year’s end._

_Yrs,  
Miranda_

…

At the height of a heat wave, each individual grain of sand that made up the beach of Nassau’s harbour seemed hot enough to burn through boot-leather and skin, to the bones sheltered beneath both. Pirates and locals alike hid under the swaying eaves of makeshift tents, those unclaimed and those adorned variously with a given ship’s flag. Soon enough, the Walrus’s own black would be brought out to mark the crew’s own spit of beach as they ferried cargo, weapons, and supplies out of her hold and piled it all ashore.

One of her sails hung almost limp, patched haphazardly after taking a cannonball through the fabric; it would be taken for proper mending, now that they had room to breathe and resources to spare. And then, sooner still, they would need not hunt for prize money for a good long while: if word from Charles Town were to be believed, the governor was assembling the requested five-and-twenty thousand of Queen Anne’s own royal pounds, all to rescue a dear friend from a fate worse than death at the hands of men turned animals.

Of course, he would then gladly deliver that selfsame friend to a penal colony near Savannah, to be quietly disposed of forever, and the governor’s guilt laid to rest. Privately, Flint wished it were possible for them to see Peter’s face upon receiving the letter that was to follow the ransom money.

He had taken the first rowboat, with Gates and a handful of gunners — “Eager as always to make your report, I see,” Gates remarked, with a smile as bland as his look was knowing.

“Eager to see the back of you lot,” Flint countered, and let an answering smile crack his expression so that the gunners would laugh, too.

He stripped layers of Captain Flint from his flesh, degree by peristaltic degree, shedding the constructs and untruths that made up Flint as a snake might shed skin: without regret. Flint’s ruthlessness would stay in the beachside tent, beside the crew’s spare pistols and casks of gunpowder and rum. Flint’s mirthless cruelty, that was more and more difficult to sustain now he had no screaming, clawing rage burning at the back of his skull, would be left in a desultory lean-to where Gates and Dufresne — pacified but still brewing with discontent, to be watched closely — would later argue manifests and falsify the letter of marque that the Walrus would need for her next planned hunt.

A few mannerisms, affected for effect; an expression to make passers-by turn away, averting their gaze; the trigger-happy indifference with which Flint was willing to finish arguments. All consigned to the sea, scattered in Nassau, moored to the Walrus where she leaned back and forth, a hornets’ nest pendulum at anchor. James shook his head and twitched back the left-hand tail of his coat, so any and all had a clear view of his weapons.

He stepped into Eleanor’s tavern with Captain Flint long peeled away, as though he — it — were a carcass with sun-whitened bones picked bare by carrion crows. He entered to the customary welcome of a moment’s fraction of silence. No-one stopped him on his way to the office.

James swung the doors open without announcing himself, and pushed them shut with the heel of one boot.

“Miss Guthrie is by the warehouses,” a heat-roughened voice came, from a man bent over the desk charting a manifest of some kind, careless in his shirtsleeves, those sleeves rolled up to the forearms, where sun had peeled skin and bleached already light hair an even paler shade, “and as we none of us are animals and this is not a barn, I’d appreciate it greatly if you knocked —” Thomas looked up, then, and trailed off.

“I’m not here for Miss Guthrie,” said James, unable to hold in a grin that wished to stretch over his face, relief and joy as tangible as ever, “and I promise next time to knock, my lord.”

It was a wonder he managed to get a full sentence out of his mouth, for in the next heartbeat he was shoved quite roughly into the unyielding wood of the door and his mouth occupied otherwise. Thomas held him collared by the shirt-front, and laughed into the kiss when James only hauled him forwards, and closer, to drink in the sensation. Six days at sea, but it seemed much longer.

“I had not heard of your return,” said Thomas, with a note of reproach. At so small a distance James felt the heat that Thomas’s skin gave off, where his sunburn healed, where Nassau made him her own, remade in her image.

“There was no time; I came here as soon as we dropped anchor.”

“I’m flattered.”

“You should be,” said James. He gave no quarter when Thomas shifted as if to move away; after the last days of separation, he would simply have to keep a stiff upper lip and survive James’s unwashed ship-stench and sweat. “Your competition is damning: the crew are riveting conversation partners. Excellent taste in literature, every last one of them.”

With a final snort of laughter Thomas pushed himself away, circumventing James’s hold with only a sigh of regret, and did not re-fasten the collar of his shirt where it had come loose. He perched upon the edge of the sprawling desk that was the office’s centre-piece, with a gesture inviting James to sit in the guest chair; and on the desk James saw, for the first time, a handsome knife pinning a sheaf of letters to the wooden surface, and a pitcher of beer with no cups in sight. A busy day, then.

He launched into his report with no further encouragement: the voyage east, until they caught up to the route of the Maker’s Grace and intercepted her at the jutting edge of a storm, cutting her off from safe avenues of passage. Her cargo was as promised: silks and brocade and fabrics which names James did not know, ferried from the East Indies or perhaps even further in the Orient. But it was not the cargo that left him breathless with hope and possibility, the thin edge of a puzzle wedging into place: it was the boatswain, who under the first application of threat of bodily harm, gladly wagered his life and limb on rumour.

“And what rumour would that be?” Thomas asked. His voice was mild, but his gaze betrayed him: curiosity sparked there, fit to light fires.

James leaned more comfortably in the chair. “He talked of a man, a Spaniard, who at times can be found in a certain whorehouse in Port Royal, and who can be plied, with rum and opium, to share a certain secret — the mother of all secrets, concerning a treasure galleon from the Spanish fleet, by name of Santísima Trinidad.”

“And the Spaniard?”

“His name, apparently,” said James, with a smile that might have been Flint’s, hungry for victory, “is Vasquez.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thomas quotes Psalm 68:23. “Who could refrain, That had a heart to love…” is from Macbeth Act 2, Scene 3. 
> 
> There are a few intentional anachronisms in the story. Most notably, _A General History of the Pyrates_ was published in 1724, and prisons in England didn’t have uniform clothes for inmates until the Victorian era. Facts concerning scurvy and dysentery are, unfortunately, not made up. The majority of my information about like everything comes from Woodard’s _Republic of Pirates_ , which is a very accessible and fascinating read.


End file.
